ANOTHER SLANT ON CONSCIOUNESS: Vulnerability, Presence, and Power

A while back I did a post on Hillary (Hillary and the Woman Thing) in which I talked about her appeal to me when she allowed herself to feel and show vulnerability. She became a much more three-dimensional figure, and I felt her presence as never before. It was a wonderful complement as well as an antidote to her poised and tough persona, which strikes me as too image-bound. This, among other things, got me thinking about how female power might differ from male power and even more generally about the connection between vulnerability, presence, and power. I will flirt with the first question here but end up focusing on the second.

I knew I had to write about this, yet it is a challenging topic. On the face of it, vulnerability isn't power, its weakness. It's a bit like claiming that up is down. I had only a sketchy, nonverbal sense about why I felt so strongly that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Then I attended a seminar at the Women's Studies Research Center, where I work, by my colleague Hilde Hein, a philosopher who studies museums. During her talk she presented a double analogy she had used years ago in a talk on aesthetics. She showed on one side of the screen a picture of a proud aggressive looking nail and on the other a more humble sewing needle just entering some fabric. Below is her eloquent description of these different implements, taken from her early paper. She writes that both are employed, “…to bind together diverse substances, both [are] progenitors of socially significant structures." You will have no difficulty knowing him from her.”

He is strong, rigid, and straight, with a point at one end, the better to penetrate resistance substances, and a strong head at the other. A few sharp and well directed strokes fix him firmly in place....He remains there, stalwart and unyielding until the material that he punctures softens and rots away and he himself becomes brittle and rusted. She, by contrast, is pliant, sleek and tapered, her purpose integrated continuously throughout her form, which is, however distinctively marked by a hole at one end. A thread, introduced through that orifice, is carried distributed and left behind to hold together and shape a unity out of separate fabrics, which, once joined,live out their collective identity long after she has passed to be of service elsewhere.

This fable of gender difference intrigued me---the commanding authoritarian male who actively maintains structures with iron force as opposed to the more generative female whose nurturing guidance leaves only an inter-psyche thread. I found myself thinking about it when I woke up the next morning and sensed that this was a way into what I wanted to say. Among other things, its truth/ non-truth quality---its aptness along with its limitations as a caricature---captures the ambivalence I feel about framing this issue through a gender lens.

In her paper Hilde focuses initially on the different kinds of artifacts and then art each produces. I will focus only (and only briefly) on the different kinds of sheltering each provides for us. The strong proud nail is essential to the outer boundary layer that separate us from the environment--- our building and houses. The more humble and well traveled needle is essential to creating a boundary layer closer in--- our clothing.

Yet we humans, both male and female, are made of the softer penetrable stuff on the outside at least. The boundary of our body with the external world, our skin and flesh, is soft and permeable like cloth. Because of this we can experience the kiss of a young spring breeze on our face and the joyful effervescence of bubble bath. Of course it also means we wound and tear. To keep out infection and to heal, we have to be sown together, with needles---and nowadays disappearing thread.

We are no crustaceans separated from the world by a hardened shell. Instead the tougher stuff, the more rigid part of our body, our bones, are hidden inside. When they break or fracture, nails---or even mental plates---may be required to keep them in place and maintain the integrity of our skeletal structure.

We are made to be permeable to the external world and to each other. (In fact what are called mirror neurons in our brain make us mirror the feelings of others even when we are unaware of doing so.) To the extent that we experience and reveal our inherent vulnerability, we paradoxically reveal the stronger stuff inside. When Hillary's face revealed her vulnerability when her opponent came over to her podium in a debate during her first Senate campaign demanding she sign a statement, she seemed not only more likable, but stronger and more resilient. We saw the bones of her Being. This moment of being seems to have been the turning point in the race.

When we defend against external forces we don't like and the feelings they bring up---something alas we all do---we pretend we can maintain ourselves inviolate. Like George Bush we hold the line and become the decider of what we will let in and what we will keep out. Instead of feeling our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life and fate, we turn it around and preemptively---and/or indiscriminately---kick ass. (The more openly vulnerable the target, the better to deflect our own banished feelings.) Instead of strength, we show meanness or bravado. Instead of letting life reveal the bones of being human, we try to stage manage it so it becomes an endless photo op.

The truth is we can't keep out difficult feelings, and perhaps especially painful vulnerability. It is inherent in the curse and gift of consciousness. Even if we try to deflect them by projecting them outward and making sure others feel them instead, they still leave their mark on us---in our muscles and maybe even our bones. In some real sense we store the unpleasant feelings we wish to keep out inside our bodies. (Remember the old saying that you become what you resist.)

My chiropractor tells me that like muscles, bones can hold tension. I'm not completely sure how this works; it could be that bones can store blocked Ch'i, or life force. In any case, the muscles that hold the bones in place have to maintain tension to do their job. I suppose as a result they can hold a certain amount of unnecessary tension as well. Difficult feelings we refuse to feel also can be stored in the patterns of reaction of muscles, including presumably the muscles that hold the bones. Whatever the mechanism, unfelt feelings tend to make our bodies function in a rigid and stiff or otherwise maladaptive way---the very opposite of the resilience and flexibility we all desire.

Experiencing vulnerability is not the same as feeling victimized. Nor does it mean taking to heart what another is saying or doing. Being vulnerable in the sense I am using it means fully feeling whatever is happening and letting it reverberate through the bones of one’s being. What I found so magnificent about Hillary in the debate in her first Senate race I described above was that she was completely present to that difficult moment.

This is a more difficult task with a backlog of stored trauma, as many of us have, or just stuff. But it is not impossible, just more of a challenge. The trick, it would seem, is to be completely permeable. This means feeling whatever is happening, remaining present as it reverberates through both our bodies and our being as long as it needs to, and then letting it pass out through the other side.

This ability to be fully present in the moment---and the next moment and the next moment--- feeling one's vulnerability to the external world and whatever it brings and brings up, links vulnerability not only to presence, but to real power. In difficult situations, correct action---actions which will serve others as well as the self---can only come from being present to what is happening as it echoes through our being before it goes out the other side. This is true whether it calls for the forceful structuring of the nail, the more gentle guidance of the needle, or something in between. No doubt we will often get it wrong, but with the effort to stay conscious, perhaps we can get it right much more of the time.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE and...(an illuminating conjunction)!

One of a series of 36 posters by Pamela Davis Kivelson for the PDK Poster Project on Women in Science.

The title of the article on women in science was a little bit odd, "Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?" and there were some other clues as well. But my misgivings were allayed by the following sentence that appeared close to the beginning. "The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, sensible answer." I experienced a pleasurable crisp feeling as I read that.

I have been somewhat less condemning of the Lawrence Summers escapade (transcripts of his comments) than most of my colleagues at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis. (See also) As a scientist I feel that even controversial, "politically incorrect" data should get an airing, especially if it speaks to critical cultural controversies. However, I have to acknowledge that I cannot say how I would have reacted had I been at his presentation.

The facts seem clearly stated in the third paragraph of the article. “ Women comprise just 19% of tenure-track professors in math, 11% in physics, 10% in computer science, and 10% in engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 25% of the Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences---way up from the 4% of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields." This apparently clear statement of the facts along with the crisp sentence cited above helped set me up (primed me) to be more accepting of the author's argument than I otherwise might have been.

She argues that the low percentage of women in these fields reflects the female tendency to prefer careers connected to nurturing. She cites, for example, a survey in which 1500 professors (gender breakdown not given) were asked what accounts for the low percentage of women and 74% chalked it up to differences in interests. She also cites work by Baron-Cohen suggesting that autism is the far end of the male spectrum. He feels that the male brain on average is wired to be better at systematizing and the female brain better at empathizing.

In a skillfully presented case, the author suggests that the campaign to get more women in these as well as other aspects of science is not just a con, but a juggernaut completely out of control. Those on the gender equality in the sciences bandwagon have hoodwinked university presidents, the NSF, and now even Congress into making a nonexistent problem a cause célèbre. A Title IX program for the physical sciences analogous to the Title IX program for sports is in effect (although its requirements have apparently been unevenly enforced). They have been able to do this, she claims, because of:

… a body of feminist research that purports to prove (emphasis added) that women suffer from “hidden bias.” This research, artfully (emphasis added) presented with no critics or skeptics present, can be persuasive. A brief look at it helps explain the mind-set of the critics and their supporters. But it is a highly ironic story. For the three recognized canons of literature are, in key respects, travesties of the scientific method, and they have been publicized and promoted in ways that ignore elementary standards of transparency in objectivity.

Since I only had the information the author gave me, at first reading I found her arguments plausible against two of the three sources used to bolster the feminists perspective (see below however). Introducing the third source, she wrote “How in the face of women's clear tendencies to choose other careers and more balanced lifestyles, can one reasonably attribute the scarcity of women in science and engineering to unconscious bias and sexist discrimination? Valian showed the way.” Quoting Valian, she continues:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action...[and being] assertive, instrumental, and task oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different: it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.

Continuing to describe Valian's work, she says:

Valian does not deny that schemas have a foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and their effect. Our society, she says, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop "a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement." All this inevitably result in a permanently unfair advantage for men.

I recognized some deep resonance with Valian’s claims. However just as I was starting to reconsider the easy pass I was giving the argument of the author of the article I was reading, I learned about mandatory gender bias workshops in which interactive theater about exaggerated situations is used to try to raise the consciousness of physicists and engineers who get government grants. This did seem over-the-top. I was also kept in line by a report of a Title IX review requiring a female physics professor to make a list of all the equipment in the lab and indicate whether women were allowed to use each item.

I finished the article and then noticed that what I had been reading was published in the American Enterprise Institute bimonthly newsletter. I also recognized that the author Christina Hoff Sommers had written an intensely antifeminist book (while claiming herself as a true feminist). Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

In retrospect, the last paragraph of the article made perfect sense.Sommer's wrote, "Americans scientific excellence is a precious natural resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation's health and safety" She then points out that people from MIT have started more than 5000 companies in the past 50 years. She asks, "Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?"

Cooperative science works, and more of it sounds great to me. Moreover, as current events strongly argue, the well-being of our economy and our health and safety as citizens depends considerably more on having leaders capable of objectivity and willing to assure adequate government regulation and than it does on resisting any hypothetical decline in scientific and technological innovation that having more women in these fields might bring. Besides having more women might increase innovation!

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Without thinking more about the article, I went on to my real task for the evening. It was once again rereading a paper by John Bargh and Melissa Fergerson on the automaticity of higher mental processes. They reviewed studies showing that researchers can prime all kinds of higher level behavior most of us generally assume depends primarily on conscious processes. For example just by giving subjects scrambled sentences containing several words relating to a stereotype they can prime subjects to identify with a stereotype and thereby influence their behavior. In one study subjects were primed with the stereotype of university professor or hooligan. In a second apparently unrelated task, those primed with the professor stereotype answered more Trivial Pursuit questions than those primed with hooligan.

Even as I have appreciated the growing body of work in Social Psychology on automatic behavior, I have been a bit resistant to it. For one thing, it seems that random priming influences would more or less cancel out in real life. Also this work is often used to make the point that introspection is useless since our behavior is governed by extraneous influences of which we are unaware. Certainly introspection, like anything else, has its limits, but it is often invaluable.

That night the words of the article almost danced on the page. I really got it, or the version of it that makes sense to me. Even very subtle consistent environmental influences can over time have a powerful and long-lasting effect on the psyche. Once again, the message about the power of conditioning hit home. Wow!



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The next morning as I lay in bed, I was quite astonished when I recognized the relevance of the work on automaticity to the women in science problem. No wonder the words danced on the page! The women in science article had in a sense primed me to get the social psychology material on environmental priming (and vice versa as well--- why not reverse priming since things stick around in our head?).

As I lay there, my thoughts kept coming back to the female junior physics professor who Sommers claimed had been required to list for Title IX reviewers whether women were allowed to use each piece of equipment. I wondered whether she had instead been asked to report, on the basis of equipment logs, the percentage of time women got to use important pieces of equipment versus men? Such a question could provide data on one aspect of potential implicit gender bias in laboratories. (The other question, if it makes sense that all, would look at explicit bias.) So I decided to check out Sommers sources. Yes, I found that the female junior physics professor, not shy about her hostility to Title IX review,really did tell a reporter for Science Magazine that she was required to list all her equipment and say if female lab members could use each piece. (I still suspect this is not the whole story.)

I will not consider the second gender-bias-in-science source Sommers critiques, as the story is too convoluted. However Sommers was less than judicious in her comments about the summary of the in-house MIT report made available to the public---which was what got the "gender equality in science" movement going in the first place. For example, she quotes from an ungenerous source, conservative anti-feminist Judith Kleinfeld who calls it “junk science” for not obtaining confidential informationin some cases and not revealing it in others.

In contrast I was struck by the judicious and sincere tone of the report. For example, on page 8, it says, “Data reviews revealed that in some departments, men and women faculty appear to share equally in material resources and rewards, in others they did not.”

Sommers in addition claims that the summary, which was publicized as showing objectively that there was a woman in science problem, failed to do so. I disagree since it documented the most important piece of information. It shows that from 1985-1994 the proportion of women in senior faculty positions in MIT’s School of Science remained constant at roughly 8%.

She also suggests the authors of the report might be misconstruing the broader problem in a critical way. Quoting from the report, she writes: [The summary concedes]“Junior women felt included and supported by their departments." Sommers continues: "Instead of acknowledging that the problem might be generational and confined to a small group of senior women from three departments, Hopkins and the other authors of the report claimed that the Junior women were naïve and simply did not know what was in store for them: [Again quoting the report] "Each generation of young women began... by believing that gender discrimination was solved in the previous generation and would not touch them.”

Quite to the contrary, the scientists place this paradox close to the core of their understanding of the problem. It is what we call the glass ceiling.

An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result. (p. 9: from section called: What the Committee Learned)

Implicit gender bias increases as women climb the academic latter . [From the summary of the report by the chair of the MIT faculty, p. 3:] "It was only when they came together, and with persistence and integrity, that they saw that as their careers advanced something else besides competence came into play, which for them meant an accumulation of slight disadvantages, with just the opposite for their male colleagues.

Two other paragraphs struck me as I read the report, especially after having "got" the work on priming.

...While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances." Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful, but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty in the light of obvious goodwill. Like many discoveries, at first it is startling and unexpected. Once you "get it," it seems almost obvious. Of (p.10-11: from section called: How Did Inequality Come about? “Gender Discrimination” in 1999).

By 1999 when the summary of the 1995 report was released as a result of its recommendations the percentage of female tenured faculty at MIT in the sciences had increased to 13%, representing a 40% increase. However as far as I can ascertain, the percentage seems to have remained relatively steady since. Certainly there are fewer women than men who want to go into these fields, no doubt in part because of innate preferences. But implicit bias against women in science, which women as well as men harbor, exacerbates the situation. (By the way, you might might want to test and see if you have unconscious bias that associates science more with men than women.)

Finally this brings us back to those over-the-top workshops on gender bias mandated by Title IX. Implicit gender bias, like other implicit bias, is nearly impossible for us to become aware of on our own. Workshops on gender bias using interactive theater and exaggerated situations, rather than indicating a feminist agenda out of control, may make sense as a way to shake up implicit as well as explicit bias. However I feel it might be even more important to have workshops in junior high, high school, and college that help counteract the bias against becoming a scientist in the young women themselves harbor.

Hillary and the Woman Thing

Written after the Iowa Caucuses and before the New Hampshire Primary

Like many others, I have trouble imagining the United States electing a woman president. I certainly like the idea,--but. Hillary might make an excellent president, but she is too relentlessly perky, too full of high notes, and exudes too little feeling for me. I prefer subtlety and a sense of depth. After eight agonizing years of putting up with George Bush and his pseudo-Texan act, I want our president to be someone highly unlikely to ever, ever, grate on me.

I understand Hillary developed the public personality she has in part in response to her need to excel and to excel in a man's world. However it is not the only possible response. I began writing this in part to do whatever little I could to encourage her to reveal other sides of herself.

What I find so interesting about the Hillary situation is that it is very likely that a moment of public vulnerability got her elected to the Senate in the first place and thus started her own career in public office. In her first Senate race, her opponent Rick Lazio was giving her a good fight; they were even in the polls. A lightweight Republican, who seemed he would do anything to win, he came over to her podium in one of the debates and aggressively demanded that she sign a no soft-money pledge. (He meanwhile was benefiting from a lot of anti-Clinton advertising from Republicans.) She responded to this invasion of her space by looking very vulnerable, human, and un-slick. I found myself really liking and respecting her in that moment. I am convinced that instant of emotional honesty turned the tide, and for what it is worth a number of commentators agreed.

I've heard on network news, which I sometimes catch snippets of at the gym, that Hillary has been trying to show her softer side. I haven't seen the actual clips of her appearances I have to admit. However I suspect that this means being folksy, down-home, and open hearted. I think all these things are fine and I don't think she should stop, but this is not what I really want from her.

Nor am I suggesting that she go out of her way to express vulnerability. However along with the vulnerability in that pivotal encounter in her first Senate race came a moment of Presence. I felt I glimpsed her strength of character as well as humanness as never before. Yes experiencing---never mind showing---that vulnerability is probably something that only a woman would do. But the sense of Presence and essential humanness that came with it got her an elected position her own.

Besides being smart and politically savvy, isn't this sense of Presence, of beingness, what we want from our leaders, men or women. With it, good leaders become statesmen and stateswomen; they inspire us. If I got to see more of this and less shiny persona from Hillary, I would not hesitate to vote for her. I would even work enthusiastically to help elect her as the first woman President of the United States.

Written after the New Hampshire Primary and just before the Nevada Caucuses

I don't get to vote for a couple of weeks, but Hillary probably now has my backing. It was not her moment in the diner in New Hampshire, which didn't really impress me that much---probably too down home and folksy for me. Instead in part it was the picture of her that appears at the very end of the following ad, which I happened to see on television the day before the diner event. None of the pictures of her here are particularly glamorous or slick, but you will know the one I am talking about when you see it. She exudes a kind of depth that is really striking.(Click hard on the arrow in the center or the You Tube icon at the bottom right; it sometimes takes some patience).

Some might say it's only PR. But you can't fake an expression like this or this kind of depth. It is part of her repertoire and I am delighted to see it.

(By the way, I do respond to Obama's rhetoric. He often exudes the kind of Presence I hope for in a political leader, but not when talking policy. My intuition while watching the last New Hampshire debate was that his oratorical skills are somewhat ahead of his governing skills and he is not ready yet.)

There is another factor working in synergy with my newly confirmed sense of Hillary's potential soulfulness that seems to be nudging me into her camp. The Democratic primary, at one level, hinges on the politics of disadvantage. Even though I was leaning towards Edwards, when I heard polls saying Obama was 12 points ahead of Hillary in New Hampshire, I didn't like it one bit. I suspect a lot of women felt this way. I actually felt a bit depressed.

Perhaps it really is time for a woman---and a woman who has that wonderful deep and un-slick expression in her repertoire, even if it is very different from her ususal self-presentation---to shepherd this country. Don't forget Golda, who had 'the look' (see last post, where she makes a cameo appearance), and was among Israel's most significant leaders. My advice to Hillary is: Play the gender card, but in the process transform it into something profound!

You might find this amusing. I was tempted to use it at the top, but thought better of it. You have to scroll down to fully appreciate it.

FOOD AND THE SPIRIT (or Re-Dedicating my Dissertation Twenty Seven Years Later)

I have a rare chance to make up for a lost opportunity. I had wanted to dedicate my PhD thesis to Julia Child. The topic had nothing to do with cooking, at least in the way the word cooking is generally used. I was studying how digestive enzymes, which are large proteins that break down the food we eat, get from the pancreas where they are made into the gut.

Instead when push came to shove I decided to dedicate it to my younger brother. He had died my junior year in college of cystic fibrosis, just shy of the age of thirteen. Cystic fibrosis is a disease in which digestive enzyme secretion is impaired and children cannot breakdown the food they eat. That's him below at my older brother's wedding---capturing the action. Had Bruce lived, he---not I---would have been the scientist in the family. Not least because my dissertation happened to be on digestive enzyme secretion, it seemed right to dedicate it to Bruce. I am glad I did.

I was drawn to the idea of dedicating my dissertation to Julia because learning to cook from her exceptional cookbook gave me the courage I needed to go into science. An intuitive type, I had always been a bit spacey. I had assiduously avoided serious science, and especially laboratory science, feeling it alien to the likes of me. Learning to cook in the years just after college under Julia’s tutelage gave me confidence in my ability to weigh and measure. She did much more; she helped ground me in the world of sensation and also introduced me to the pursuit of excellence.

Though nominally I was teaching, my real job---and joy---was cooking. In the beginning my love affair with Julia and fine food took place in a tiny closet of a kitchen with no counter space what-so-ever and only a 2 x 2.5 foot table. Nonetheless I followed almost every step of her recipes as if they were sacred texts that held the secret to life. In some sense to me that's just what they were--- and I suspect I was not the only one. Julia opened this country up to the joys of the palate and much more.

I wonder did Julia serve as a stepping stone into science for anyone else---or am I the only one? As a youngster I knew science was supposed to be about observing the natural world, but little I saw jibed with what scientists supposedly said--- like apples and feathers falling at the same rate. At another level the control and precision that experiments required was not associated with women for me. Women didn't control the environment, men did. I don't think a male Julia Child, clarity, nonchalance, breathiness and all, would have had the same influence on me. Because Julia was a woman, she gave me permission; once I had begun to master French Cooking, the possibility of mastering other things became real to me as well.

My skill with cooking eventually went beyond just following Julia’s instructions. As I mentioned in my last post "Intuition and Brussels Sprouts," sometimes when I put myself in a special non–thinking but completely attentive state while adjusting the seasoning of the dish, I would know just when it was enough. Cooking tends to involve great deal of implicit learning, unconscious information processing, and expertise. However the connection between cooking and intuition is even deeper.

Years ago, when a friend and I were traveling together throughout Western US and Canada, she taught me to choose restaurants by their signs. It turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb--- a restaurant with an appealing sign generally had correspondingly good food. Over the years, I have thought a lot about what this special something is that goes beyond good design.

Sometimes even a very simple restaurant sign or simple cooking rises to the level of art. Like all art, it depends on a combination of knowledge, skill, and creativity that ‘cook’ together below awareness---in short on intuition. Yet I feel that artistic quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain a sign that draws you into a restaurant or the good food that so often goes with it. Sometimes a sign that bespeaks good food to me can by no stretch of the imagination be called art.

I suspect some even more basic intuitive alchemy connects the sign an owner of a restaurant chooses to hang to invite people in and the food they prepare. Both share an inherent movement or dynamism that appeals and sometimes even fascinates. We feel enriched by looking at them or tasting them—and perhaps especially when the dynamism is ‘oh so subtle.’ (It might come from a just barely perceptible rhythm to the lettering or composition.) The sign forms an appealing as well as self-sustaining, or continuing, pattern in space--- and the food an appealing and self-sustaining pattern of tastes. These patterns resonate with something etched in the human spirit. To the extent we linger with them, they connect us more deeply to ourselves and also at the same time connect us to something larger than ourselves.

On Julia's website at the Smithsonian below a picture of her in the kitchen in France where she first started to cook is a quote from her “The whole thing was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me." Food is the most direct way we take in the external world and make it part of ourselves. Much of the time we eat without awareness. We are just following our biological imperative to survive. But when we do it with consciousness, this transmutation of world into self can also become a bridge between the sensual and spiritual. To begin with, as the tradition of saying grace highlights, we appreciate the bounty of the earth.

When the food is really delicious---to the extent we savor it--- we are also led into different and more rarefied realms of appreciation and even joy. The cook who pats herself on the back for making a wonderful new dish, in addition to appreciating her own skills, is celebrating---even when she doesn't know it---the slightly enlarged world of nuanced experience her own intuition has opened for herself and guests. (Of course, this opening might instead depend on the intuition of others codified in a recipe, combined with her skill.) When she makes and serves an old favorite, she revisits that special place again.

If you want to get heightened sense of the way food can carry one beyond oneself to new places, you might try a radical experiment---eating a wonderful meal in the company of friends in complete silence. It is hardly anti-social! Rather to the extent one remains present, it leads to an intensified experience of both food and friends. “It is the nectar.” as a friend who I convinced to lunch in silence on the veranda of a lovely restaurant in Italy during a busy conference said. Alas, Julia opened the possibility of experiencing this nectar for so many of us.

Had I dedicated my thesis to Julia back then, my appreciation of her influence on my life would have been incomplete. I was still years away from my current interest in exploring and resonating the experience and science of intuition. But what is a mere twenty seven years when completeness is at stake? Here is the original dedication, and below what I would now add:

This dissertation is dedicated to Bruce Isenman. He wanted to be a scientist, and I believe nothing would have stopped him had he lived.

This study is also dedicated to Julia Child. By teaching me to weigh and measure with the best of them, she gave me the confidence I needed to become a scientist. I now know that she also helped chart my course beyond to resonate more subtle yet no less real realms of knowledge and experience with scientific understanding.

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OTHER RESTAURANT SIGNS I THINK INTERESTING
(A Work In Progress)

I have not eaten at all these restaurants whose signs I think bespeak good food or find interesting for one reason or another. It is no doubt a better test of the rule when the food is unknown. (I apologize for the quality of some of the pictures. I am using Picasa for the first time, and the quality of the uploads seem inconsistent. Any insight appreciated.)

I am not sure about what these signs reveal, but I am certainly intrigued by them. The restaurant has been there since my college years and back then had excellent subs. It recently closed.

This one has changed hands at least once and probably more---so it might be a legacy issue as well.

The signs in the foodcourt of the Porter Exchange in the old Sears Building in Cambridge seem to be all by the same artist. They are very attractive but to my mind verging on slick. I think signs by an artist hired by a corporation for a foodcourt are less telling. Most of the food is quite good at the Porter Exchange, if I remember correctly, and hardly slick!

Of Temples and Grasses: A Visit to the Yucatan Peninsula

I’m just back from a conference in Mexico held on what is called the Mexican Riviera on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. After the conference I spent a number of days on the Yucatan Peninsula visiting Mayan ruins. In part I felt I SHOULD, but something else seemed to be calling me as well. I first went to Merida, a former Mayan city that was destroyed by the conquistadors and is now a city with a strong colonial influence. Only the cities that the Mayans had already abandoned were NOT destroyed.



The first day I took a tour to Uxmal and then to Kabah --two Mayan ruins about an hour away. I approached them as a tourist, conscientiously trying to take in as much information as I could. The picture shows the main temple at Uxmal. The Mayans were inveterate temple builders, often building temple over temple on the very same site, as they did here. They painted them bright red.
The next day I had planned to take a tour to see some caves and three lesser Mayan sites. I wondered whether it was really worth it. After all I was going to go to Chetzen Itza and then Tulum and could instead use the day to explore Merida. Wouldn't the law of diminishing returns begin to set in? Nonetheless I decided to go ahead with the plan I had so carefully worked out.

The bed and breakfast I was staying at had an arrangement with a tour company. I signed up with them, rather than with another company that had an apparently similar tour about 15 percent cheaper. It was easier and I wanted to help out the inn keeper.

I had great trouble understanding the tour guide who picked me up. Eventually I realized that he was announcing that lunch was not included as I (and apparently many others) just assumed. It seems to be the custom there and it was included in the other tour.

No lunch and all day with a tour guide I didn't understand (and another couple who did not speak English). I said I didn't want to go and asked for my money back. The driver kept crossing himself and spitting into his hands. We were a ways from the hotel by this time, so he drove me to the downtown office of the tour company. First they said I should go back to the hotel, they would call, and the hotel would give me my money back. When I asked them to put that in writing they said they would pay for my lunch, if I would go on the tour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I agreed.



The Loltun caves, the first stop, have been used since prehistoric times. The Mayans hid from the conquistadors in them. Extending at least 6 km, they have many broad caverns and massive stalagmites. (To see them required hiring a special guide---who used a laser pointer.) I realized for them alone the day was worth it.

The minor sites were-well minor sights---at least for someone without much insight into the intricacies of different Mayan styles. (Actually, I have now come to appreciate the unique style of these ruins.) They were largely free of other tourists. I tried to believe what my guide was saying but some of its strained credulity. By no stretch of the imagination could I see elephant trunks in the many odd shaped protuberances punctuating the façade of one of the buildings. Soon I stopped listening.





Instead I tuned into the peacefulness of the day and the calmness of the grass in front of the long temple. Eventually I glanced at where the grass met the corner of the wall of the Temple. I experienced the coolness and impartiality of the stones and the strength, permanence, and angularity of the wall. I realized that Mayan architecture served at least in part as a bulwark against the natural word--- against the softness and fecundity of nature, on the one hand, and against human dependence on it and powerlessness in the face of it whims, on the other. The wall had a presence---one that spoke back to the passing of time and our limited lifespan and said something forceful and lasting.

I recognized this "standing up to nature” as the masculine project. I do not identify with it personally, yet I do feel very appreciative of it. On the way out of the site, the guide called our attention to a carved pillar of a Mayan warrior off to the side of the path. He said that it was unusual for carved columns NOT to have hieroglyphics, but the Mayans wanted to have warriors on their columns because they were interested in “imposing constraints.” I suspect that carved pictures long predated carved hieroglyphics. Nonetheless with those two words, ‘imposing constraints,’ my guide--- full of the unexpected---had captured my new insight about Mayan architecture as well as the masculine project in a nutshell.

My experience at Chechen Itza helped deepen at the same time that it opened up my insight about the Mayans. I saw the main temple for the first time during the evening Sound and Light show. It had a presence and power that spoke back to nature in a somewhat different way.




In its perfection it captured not only the human spirit, but something other worldly as well. I found it awesome in the real senses of the word. The next day, even amid the crowds and the heat, from time to time I was able to give myself over to its power and authority. Then it spoke to me not only as a beautiful artifact, but as something charged with human spirit, even as it surpassed the human spirit. This was much more than just the masculine project—though I cannot say what it might be.

My guide the next day---a very thoughtful and sensitive man--said that the power of Mayan culture came from the fact that women were educated just like men and were considered equals. Given the hierarchical nature of ancient Mayan culture, I have my doubts that this is true (or true throughout the many centuries the Mayan culture flourished.) Jean Molesky-Poz, one of the woman I got to know at the conference, is an expert on contemporary Mayan spirituality, with a focus on women. She described a gentle culture in which people were very in touch with each other with the Earth and with Spirit. I am going to buy her book, which in part looks at the continuity between contemporary and ancient Mayan spirituality, to see if it might provide some hints of what “this more” is I experienced at Chetchen Itza
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As I waited for my bus in the parking lot to take me to Tulum, the Mayan city by the sea, I tried an experiment. Could I give myself over to other buildings in this way and would they speak to me as well? I tried ‘to listen’ to the buildings that housed the ticket office and market around Chechen Itza but they seemed to have very little to say.


At Tulum, known more for its setting than it architecture, I appreciated the beauty of this site perched above the sea. But when I try to ‘listen’ all that really spoke to me in this special way was the long grass towards the far end of the extensive site waving rhythmically and sweetly in the breeze.


The last picture is from the Governor's Palace in Merida. After my tour to the minor sites, I told the tour guide (of imposing constraints fame) to drop me off at the contemporary art museum. He said that I should go see the murals on the second floor of the Governor's palace instead. I didn't, but the next morning, I rushed out to get a look before my bus to Chetchen Itza. I am so glad I did. The 26 murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco depict the history of the Mayans on the Yucatan Peninsula. This is the center picture of three that frame the well of the grand staircase. It represents the birth of Mayan man from an ear of maze, as described in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayans.

Breaking Ground---A Little Lower Than the Angels

Being the first, I am coming to realize, is not always all it is cracked up to be. I was the first to come up with the metaphor a blink of the eye for unconscious cognition and intuition and published it in 1997---long before Malcolm Gladwell and Blink. I am proud of it, but it has been a mixed blessing. Another first is that I was the first girl to have a Bat Mitzvah at Temple Israel in Boston. It was also a mixed blessing, but in a different way. This post is about my Bat Mitzvah. If you want to know more about my experience around the blink of the eye metaphor for intuiton, check out my Oct 24 post, Things Are Not As They Seem.

Sometimes I say that my mother was the first Bat Mitzvah at Temple Israel, because it was her idea. She was a feminist before her time. The first girl after four boys, like her brothers, my mother became a lawyer. Yet she practiced only briefly; parts of her nature were not really suited to it. She struggled instead, as she put it, “to accept her role as a wife and mother."

I had very little to do with my Bat Mitzvah except to learn my Torah part. I don't remember learning it, I don't remember when the idea of me having a Bat Mitzvah first came up, and I don't remember how I responded to the idea. Obviously I didn't object seriously. But I wonder, did I say “Yes,” enthusiastically, or did I say, “It's okay with me, if you want me to.” Most of my experience around my Bat Mitzvah is shrouded with this kind of vagueness and haze.

My older brother’s Bar Mitzvah I remember well. I remember Paul studying his Bar Mitzvah part, I remember the monumental preparations---especially the wonderful engraved invitations---that consumed my mother. I remember the luncheon and the magician who did the entertaining. I also remember how happy I felt. It seemed a mitzvah, a blessing, for the whole family.

I also remember the extraordinary charm bracelet wonderful friends of my parents gave me. I still have it. It has a book that opens, a watering can with a bird on it, a bell, and a lock with my name engraved on it---and other charms as well. It was right up there in my mind with engraved invitations.

Even my misanthropic grandfather, my mother's father, who didn't attend family celebrations came to my brother’s bar mitzvah. That was quite a coup--- though he wouldn’t let anyone know he was coming for sure until the last minute. What I don't remember directly, I can pretty much reconstruct from the abundant pictures and movies taken of the event. As I write this, I feel choked up; Paul's Bar Mitzvah had that much meaning to me.

I suppose at some level I did not object to the idea of having a Bat Mitzvah because I too wanted to be the center of so much meaning. Yet the only things I remember when it first came up was the wonderful anticipation of the engraved invitation that would announce the event. Engraved invitations were so reified, so official, so beautiful to me. I was certain that they transform the messiness and changeability of self into a sleek and compelling, permanent public offering.

But back to the haze. Yes I wanted to be the center of so much meaning, and I certainly wanted whatever my brother had, but I did not feel it was really kosher. After all I was only a girl. My brother---the first child and a son--- deserved all this fuss because at the age of 13 he became a man in the eyes of the congregation , and like generations of men before him could be part of a minyon or called to read from the Torah. I had no model for Jewish women having an equal role in official religious practice. Without this how could I feel I deserved this ceremony of coming of age or find emotional or spiritual meaning in the experience. Without this it was---at least at the conscious level, a short-term celebrity grab--- although one eminently justifiable from an egalitarian point of view.

Apparently my mother, the prime mover behind my bat mitzvah, felt the same ambivalence. I know because SHE DIDN’T ORDER ENGRAVED INVITATIONS, she wrote them out by hand instead. She tried to tell me that it was much nicer, more personal--- but she didn't fool me.

No doubt another reason for my haze surrounding my Bat Mitzvah was it was also my first year at boarding school. Since my birthday is in October, so I had been at Howard's Seminary for Girls, about an hour away from our home, for only a month or two before the ceremony. Anticipating going away from home, must have taken up a lot of my emotional energy in the months before.

My Bat Mitzvah might have happened on Oct 13. (I am surprised that any date came to mind.) I came home for the weekend. I remember what I wore; it was my good outfit---a purple wool skirt with a matching purple sweater. It seemed sacrilegious not to be wearing a new outfit to one's Bat Mitzvah.

I don’t remember anything about the service. The party was in the reception hall at the temple. The only thing I recall are spotlights held by someone standing on a chair taking pictures, which bothered my eyes. I do not remember ever seeing any pictures, either stills or movies. I do not remember getting any gifts. Perhaps my mother had also written on the invitations-- no gifts.

For years I have felt secretly ashamed of what a non-event my Bat Mitzvah was for me. Only in thinking about writing this piece have I realized that the vagueness I felt was completely appropriate. Extending the coming of age ceremony to girls in 1956 reflected the same urges that eventually gave birth to the feminist movement 10 or so years later. No doubt my own deep-seated but inarticulate feminist and egalitarian feeling were a factor in me going along with my mother's more articulated feminist desire for me to have a Bat Mitzvah. But like my leaving home to go to boarding school, this leaving what was known and making the transition to something other was deeply conflictual. In the world that has made me, girls were lesser than men and did not have Bat Mitzvahs, and did not read from Torah, but in the world that made me also girls did not want to be the lesser than men. No wonder I felt vague.

There was one tangible and very important result of my Bat Mitzvah. Like Bat Mitzvah boys, I had to promise the temple that I would continue with religious school until confirmation in the 10th grade. For two years at Northfield School for Girls---where I went for high school---I attended religious school by mail. The second year the text was a book written by the head rabbi at the Temple Roland Gittelson, called Little Lower Than the Angels. It was about the place we humans have in the cosmos, a topic that resonated deeply with me and continues to do so today.

Saturday evening, when most of the girls would go to movies in the auditorium, those of us who stayed behind would gather in the living room, listen to classical music, and quietly do our own thing. I would read Little Lower Than the Angels and answer the questions in the worksheets sent to me monthly. The sense of peace and contentment was so complete that I experienced the others returning from the movies as an unwelcome and fatal intrusion; it broke the circle of Being until the next Saturday night. Along with my brothers Bar Mitzvah and reading the funnies on Sunday morning on the living room floor, while my dad read the Globe in his chair, these Saturday nights at Northfield stand out in my mind as the richest and most contented epxeriences of my young life.

Years later I indirectly wrote about my brother’s Bar Mitzvah for a book about growing up Jewish in America called, Daughters of Kings. I described the trip I took to Poland and to Auschwitz. Talking about my experience at the Museum at Auschwitz, after visiting the death camp,

Close to the end of the exhibition the photos gave way to canvases depicting contemporary Jewish life. I scanned quickly until my eyes came to rest on tableau of a bar mitzvah boy reading from the Torah, flanked on one side by his father and on the other by the rabbi. …I felt completely absorbed. In its treatment of the figure and the light the picture revealed to me a sense of the sustained upward impulse of Judaism into spirit. In it I recognize the basic religious urge that as the top the core of Jewish experience. The gentle streams of light filling the sanctuary above the figure evoked feelings of both profound yearning and fulfillment. The loving life gave both new and renewed meaning to the familiar images of Torah reading and religious coming of age; in that moment I realized how thoroughly Jewish I am.

I am still not an observant Jew, yet spirituality is an anchor of my life, and being Jewish another. Just perhaps had I grown up in an egalitarian tradition, I would have found a place for myself within traditional Jewish practice. At the unconscious level I am almost sure that having a bat mitzvah did hold spiritual meaning for me. In any case I take great comfort in the fact that being one of the pioneers of Bat Mitzvah has helped make room for Jewish girls to receive the holiness signified in the Jewish ceremony of coming to age, I felt so clearly that day at Auschwitz.

I suspect that successful traditions generally begin in vagueness. They are for the most part the result of an intending that comes from someplace much deeper and impersonal than the conscious mind. They are precognitive and their implicit goal is to change the context within which we experience. The conscious mind goes along, perhaps making up convincing sounding reasons that turn out to be correct, or perhaps just not knowing why. Yet with time, as these traditions influence the world they create a context of meaning that makes them fit at all levels of experience--- emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and historical.

_______________________

After I posted this, I became haunted by the following passage Rosie Rosenzweig had written about her mother at her daughter's Bat Mitvzah. Born in 1900, her mother grew up in Grodno Poland; she immigrated before WWII to Canada to join Rosie's father, who had left several years earlier. The passage is from a longer piece called "Mourning Becames a Bat Mitzvah." The piece is one of Rosie's contributions to Sweeping Up the Heart: The Wisdom of Our Grieving, an anthology about loss and grieving a number of us from at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center are putting together.

Her First Touch at 82
by Rosie Rosenzweig

True to the old world Jewish Mother stereotype portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof, my mother was in perpetual dialogue with God addressing him as Rebeyne Shel Olam (Teacher of the Universe) with an occasional Oiy Got (Oh God!) I remember at my own daughter’s bat mitzvah when my mother was honored with an aliyah (“a going up”) to the Torah; when the parchment scroll holding the first five books of the Hebrew Bible was unrolled, she became transfixed in awe. In Grodno this would have been a forbidden act – for a woman to plant a kiss on the fringes of a prayer shawl, and to then take those fringes and touch the opened scroll itself.

At 82 and partially blind, this experience seemed to render her in a state of momentary ecstasy.

I wrote a small sentimental poem, which was read years later when a newly written Torah scroll was inaugurated into the curtained ark after being carried under a bridal canopy. (At an earlier date, I was first given the same honor; I actually looked up at the ceiling to see if some flash would strike me down. Patriarchal Jewish chauvinism and years of being sent back from the men’s side of the synagogue in my youth had taken its toll.)

Can I touch it? She asked,
In blind devotion,
Groping the air above the scroll.
Can I really touch it?

And before the rabbi turned his head,
She lightly tapped her mouth
And then the parchment pure.

Can I do it once again?
And she knew it more this time.
I heard a learning from her mouth to me.
No lightning struck,
Nor clouds did part.

Only for a moment,
This memory opened up my sky.
My mother, my teacher,
May this blessing
Be more than a memory.

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